On 14 November, Mozilla released a new version of Firefox called Quantum, which is literally a quantum leap in performance over the previous versions. Mozilla says the new version 57 is twice as fast as the previous version and takes about 30% less memory compared to competitors (cough Chrome cough).

They have made a lot of performance improvements to the browser core and takes better advantage of the latest hardware and better memory handling because of a better programming language.

Anyway, I have been using Firefox 57 as my primary browser for the past 5 days and there has been a significant improvement in the overall performance of my laptop as a result of this. Previously when I was using Chrome, the Memory pressure in the Activity Monitor always showed yellow and many times in red. After quitting Chrome, I have been consistently in the green and the entire computer feels responsive.

If you want to use a fast and responsive browser, but don’t want to close all other applications to run just your browser, check out the new Firefox. But what good is a browser without all the extensions? Here are the 7 extensions I installed as soon as I started using Quantum.

0. Pocket

You don’t have to install the Pocket extension as Firefox Quantum has it built-in (after it was acquired in February 2017). You just have to sign in to your pocket account and start saving web pages to be read later. This isn’t a big deal if you don’t use Pocket a lot. But personally I use it and I have already written about how I use Zapier to save my Pocket entries as bookmarks in Pinboard.

0.5 Screenshot

This is also a built-in feature in the new Firefox. This screenshot tool is much better than the Awesome Screenshot extension I used in Chrome. I can take screenshots of specific div or sections on the page. Firefox also provides free storage space for the screenshots. You can also set expiry date for each screenshot. This makes it easy to share screenshots with my team.

If you are a Chrome user, you must have used the built-in Profiles feature. You can start completely new browser instances with separate sessions, cookies and history for your personal and work. I used to have separate profiles for my Gmail, Work, and other domains that I manage.

This does have a problem as sometimes I open a tab in one profile, which I want to open in another. Example, every day I have setup Rescuetime to open a page to log my achievements and it opens a tab in a different browser window in which I haven’t signed in. I always wanted to have separate profiles for just a few websites and one common default profile for everything else.

Firefox’ Containers does it better. You can assign multiple Containers for each of your task, example personal, work, Shopping, banking, etc. You also have a default container, which is what opens whenever you click on any link from other applications. This makes it easy to have only specific websites to be containerized and other pages to be opened in default setting.

To manage the Containers, you have to use this Multi Account Container extension. You can customize your containers, give them names and customize it with different colors. You can also set specific domains to always open in specific containers – like your bank website to always open in Banking container.

I use LastPass as my password manager – to save and sync my passwords across multiple browsers. By just installing and logging in, I am able to sign in to all my websites without having to remember any password. I just have to remember one master passphrase and I don’t care how complex my passwords on individual sites are.

I usually auto generate most of the passwords using LastPass, (sometimes with reaaallly long lengths). I don’t worry if any one site is compromised, I can just change the password on that one site.

Everyone uses adblockers nowadays, that’s a given. Previously Adblock Plus was the most popular extension, then uBlock became popular because it was lightweight on CPU and memory. uBlock then got forked to uBlock Origin, as the creator had some issues with the spirit of the project. So uBlock Origin is the latest and actively developed fork. It blocks most of the ads on the web and even if it misses some, you can select an ad and block it.

This is an extension I was using in Chrome. When I have too many tabs open in a browser, I hit this OneTab button and all the unpinned tabs are saved in a separate tab and closed. This frees up your browser and mental space as you don’t have to be overwhelmed by the number of tabs that are open in the browser. Your memory also gets freed up, as all the tabs that were hogging your RAM is now closed. It also has an easy export tool which exports the URLs in a plain text format.

Just like I like to listen to podcasts at a much higher speed, I also have an extension to speed up my videos in the browser. I typically try to watch them at a 1.3x speed, beyond which I find it hard to catch up. Once you begin watching videos at a faster rate, you would start consuming more content through YouTube videos. I even used to watch Netflix series at a faster rate.

This is an extension which I use to clean up web pages which are content heavy. It removes all the sidebar and unnecessary content and formats the main text in a nice clean font which is easy on the eyes to read. You can also print the page or email it to someone.

On Chrome I used Mercury Reader, which had the added feature of sending the article directly to Kindle. But it isn’t available for Firefox.

This is a new extension I have started to use more as I have started to write more. Grammarly makes sure all of your text is clear, mistake-free and not have any gramatical errors. Once you add it to Firefox, it checks all text boxes and highlights how many errors are present. You can click it and see details about the errors and fix them in one click.

This is very useful as I usually write in Sublime Editor and copy-paste it into WordPress. Once it is pasted, Grammarly checks all the typos and grammatical mistakes and highlights them. I don’t know how I lived all these days without this.

What extensions do you use?

These are the extensions I have currently on my Firefox. I still haven’t install Pinboard, Evernote, Reddit Enhancement Suite, Enhanced Steam, and others which I had in my Chrome.

What are some of the extensions which you like? Leave them in the comments below.

I am a regular podcast listener even before the recent upsurge of numerous podcast shows that has cropped up in recent times. This year I have listened to a record number of podcast episodes. I have learned a lot from them and I have also improved the way I listen and take notes. In this post, I will explain why and where I listen to podcasts, how I listen at nearly 2x speeds and the quickest way to take notes.

Why listen to podcasts?

The reason I listen to podcasts is very simple. Podcasts allow me to sit through a conversation between two important people who you could never meet in real life. I can be a “fly on the wall” listening to their conversation, learning from the best minds in the word.

Just imagine being able to sit with some of the brilliant marketers, entrepreneurs, copywriters, and other heroes and listen to their story. You get an hour of quality time with them and you don’t even have to ask them any questions. The host is doing all the hard work of researching about them and making the conversation interesting.

Where do I listen?

There are only a few places where I listen to podcasts. Occasionally I drive to work and I listen to few episodes during my drive. But since my commute is only about 20 minutes, I can squeeze in one episode maximum (I will tell one trick to listen to a 30-minute episode in 20 minutes).

Sometimes when I drop my wife at her office (which takes at least an hour) I can get some real quality time listening to more than 1 episode or one longer episode. However, I can listen to podcasts only when I am lonely in the car. My wife doesn’t like to listen to podcasts and would plug in her iPhone and play music.

When I Uber to work, I don’t listen to podcasts as the driver sometimes talk to me or ask directions and I don’t want to be rude.

Other times, I walk a bit and come back home on a train or sometimes even walk all the way home. This takes at least 1.5 hours and this gives me some serious podcast listening time. Of course one has to be mindful of the surroundings with earphones plugged in when walking on the roads.

A decent pair of wireless earphones makes it easy to listen to podcasts when walking. Since it’s all speech, I don’t care about the audio quality too much.

I have tried to listen to podcasts when I get onto the bed, but unfortunately, after 5 minutes I doze off and the podcast keeps playing for hours before I pause it. So I avoid listening in the bed.

How do I listen?

I use the Overcast podcast app for iPhone. I would say this is the best podcast app for iPhone. To my knowledge, this is the only app which has the “Smart Speed” feature, which shortens unwanted silences and other fillers in conversations. You can get 1.15x speed increase just by turning on “Smart Speed” with no noticeable difference in speech.

I go even one step further, where I increase the playback speed. I have heard of people go crazy speeds like 2x or 3x. But I have found that 1.75x is the maximum that I can sustain, especially when I am driving.

It isn’t too hard to train your ear and brain to start listening to 2x speeds. As you keep listening to speech and conversations at higher speeds, your brain automatically processes it without any loss of information. There are visually impaired people who have screen readers speaking at 5x speeds. Those are crazier compared to the 1.75x I listen to.

Along with the Smart Speed feature, I can hit 1.9-2x speed and that is a good enough pace to listen to podcasts. Once you start listening to such high speeds, if you try to go back to the old normal speed, it would feel as if everyone is deliberately slowing things down and it begins to feel funny.

How to get the most out of podcasts?

Podcasts are useless if you just keep listening to them and going on to the next episode. You are spending a significant time listening to it and it would all go to waste if you didn’t have a method to take notes of the episodes. I tried a variety of tools to take notes, here are them all.

Ask Siri to “make a note”

When listening, you can just say “Hey Siri, make a note. <insert your nugget of information>. I usually turn off the “Hey Siri” feature and prefer pressing the physical button to activate Siri. When driving, I can long press the phone button on my steering wheel to activate Siri.

But the problem with this is many times Siri doesn’t transcribe my message properly and I missed a lot of messages. Also, Siri would assume that the message is completed even though I am still talking.

Ask Siri to “record a voice memo”

Another option is to ask Siri to “record a voice memo” which opens up the voice recorder. Now you can talk speak your message and it gets recorded in your own voice. This is much better than making a note.

But voice recorder is all hidden away and I prefer to use a much simpler tool for recording short notes.

Send a Whatsapp message to yourself

Initially, I was sending voice messages and short notes to my wife and she was getting confused why I sent unrelated messages. Then I started sending Whatsapp messages to myself. Yes, you can send messages to yourself (sort of).

To do that, you have to first create a group with one other person. Name this group and then remove the other person from the group. Now you have a group with just yourself. Name it as “me” or “Myself”. Now you can send short messages and notes to yourself.

I prefer this nowadays as I have a history of all the messages and voice memos. Now I have a long history of conversations containing little nuggets of information, which I can later research on and move to my permanent Evernote notebook.

Listen to important episodes again

If you have some important episode which has so much information, it would make sense to listen to it again, and again. The goal here is to not memorize the content but to listen to it again in a different setting which will allow you to pick some new useful information every time.

I have noticed this when watching some comedy movies, on watching it once more, you unearth some small piece of comedy or dialogue which you missed earlier. I have experienced this during podcast episodes too. For important episodes, I just note down the episode number and I listen to it again.

These are my tips to listening to podcasts. What are some of your tips and tricks? And how do you take notes of your favourite episodes? Leave them in the comments below.

When writing copy for a product’s homepage, one mistake I see everyone doing is they keep talking about all the features that their product has. I see a lot of websites that keep listing down the different features and how it is better than the competition. I can go to 10 websites and at least 8 of them would have listed their features in it.

One great example that everyone talks about is how Apple sold the first iPod. When all it’s competitors were selling 2GB MP3 players, Apple was the first to sell “all your music in your pocket”. Instead of selling a 5GB player, they said “store more than 1000 songs”. That is the power of benefits vs features.

The problem with listing all the features is that your visitor/prospective user has to do all the hard work of understanding the product and how the features will help him. Your visitors don’t care about the features or technical specs or what patented technology you are using. He is interested in learning how your product is going to solve the problem he has. In other words, what benefits he is going to get from your product.

Steps to turn your features into benefits

There are very easy steps to convert your features into benefits. Let’s take the example of a video conferencing product that I saw in ProductHunt. I will walk you through the 3 step process to convert the features into benefits.

Step 1: List down all of your features.

These are the features that were listed on the site.

No downloads

50 person meetings

Dual screen shares

Custom domains

International dial-in

Meeting recording

Step 2: Add “so you can” suffix

Now add the words “so you can” at the end of the sentence and try to finish the sentence with a benefit for your user.

No downloads needed, so you can begin conversations immediately without waiting to download some software.

Conduct 50 person meetings, so you can invite all the team members in your call.

Dual screen shares, so two people can share at the same time, without waiting for one person to finish.

Custom domains, so you can get easily shareable links.

International dial-in, so you can take calls even if you are on the go.

Meeting recording, so you can go back to refer when you write your meeting notes.

This exercise has allowed you to truly understand what your features really mean to your customers.

Step 3: Make it emotional

Take each feature that your product does and ask yourself how it helps achieve your user’s desires or helps alleviates his fears.

Start your meetings on time without waiting for your attendees to download some software.

Invite your entire team without fear of missing out because of space.

Easily share two screens simultaneously and collaborate in real time.

Setup your own custom domains so that your meeting links look professional in front of your clients.

Are you traveling? Don’t reschedule. Instead, call our Free international dial-in numbers and join over the phone.

Unlimited recording allows you to remember every piece of conversation during the call.

See how with just a short 3 step process, we have converted our list of features into benefits that are easily understandable to your users. Reading each bullet point in this makes the user want to start signing up immediately.

Create benefits which are emotional

Always follow the process and complete all 3 steps listed above. The 3rd step is the most important one which evokes strong emotion in the reader. He might have had a bad experience before and if your product fixes it, this step will make sure that he signs up for your product.

Tip: To learn to use his own language to identify his fears, uncertainty and desires, check out my previoustwo articles.

Sometimes, you would be tempted to reuse the same points you uncovered in step 2. Here are some more examples of why understanding your user’s inner desires and fears are important.

Instead of

“The quickest way to burn all your fat.”, write “Slim down in few weeks, without feeling hungry”.
“Deliver your project by improving the efficiency”, write “Pull off a great project and look like a hero in front of your boss.”
“Easily change your website design without even paying for a developer”, write “Don’t get cheated by expensive developers when you can easily click and drag to change your website design”.

Remember, use benefits instead of features and hit your users at the emotional level.
Use these steps and remember the above rules when you write your next copy. That will ensure that you will convert more and sell more.

In yesterday’s article, I explained 6 different ideas to read your customer’s mind and use the language/words that they use. I missed one important source of your customers – your competitors. Where else can you find new customers, other than your competitors?

Your competitor’s websites are an important place to understand about the product you are building and how your prospects use the product. Checking out the landing page and seeing what kind of words that your competitors use is an important step in your copywriting process.

Here are 3 ways to use your competitor’s websites to write great copy.

Testimonials

Most SaaS products have testimonials from existing customers on the home page. Unfortunately, most of the testimonials don’t tell any story about how the product helped solve the customer’s most important pain point. But on some rare occassions they do tell a story – of how they were struggling before, and their life transformed after using the product.

Use testimonials as inspiration for your copy

In the above example, you can see how important the automation rules are an important feature of Convertkit. And the takeaway here is that all other competitors have very limited rules or its too overwhelming. If your product solves the same problem, but better than ConvertKit, use these exact words to drive home the point.

Social Media

If you don’t get enough good testimonials from the competitor’s websites, then you have to look at social media – especially twitter or linkedin. Do a search for the competitor’s name and see what people talk about. Check out the problems they tweet about and the praises too. This kind of research is very important even before you build the product, but will also prove to be useful when it comes to writing copy too.

If you take this tweet, it shows how a normal user became a designer overnight. This uses the hopes and dreams of your user to show a world where they can design things without anyone’s help. Me beind a non-designer, copy like this would really make me want to sign up.

Case Studies

Most products publish case studies on their blogs – on how their customers use their products. They are usually an interview with the customer with detailed questions and answers about how they used the product and what problems it solved.

Case Studies are much more detailed than a simple one line testimonial. They give you more information about how actual customers use the product than any kind of research you could do with mockups/prototypes. What were their struggles, fears and uncertainity they felt, how the competitor helped solve all those.

One great page I would use as an example here is HubSpot’s customers page. It has a short blurb as a testimonial from the customer, but each testimonial in that page has a link to a detailed case study. One example I just picked randomly has the following text.

[CRYO] now has seven stores across the UAE. It has also moved into the manufacture and sale of cryotherapy equipment and the supply of cryogenic gas, and it has inked deals with franchisees in the US, Australia, Argentina, Kuwait and Turkey.

“We wanted to pitch to our potential clients in a more targeted and data-driven way.”

…

“They either weren’t user-friendly enough or they didn’t have all the features we needed to produce truly integrated campaigns.”

This shows how a customer expanded to 7 stores in a country and soon had to deal with franchisees all over the world. This opened up the problem of “pitching to clients in a more targeted way”. Also the customer talks about how existing tools “weren’t user-friendly enough” or “didn’t have all the features”. These kinds of words and phrases are what needed to be used in your copy.

These kind of information is an important tool in your copy. Even if you look at 5 competitors websites and go through 3-4 case studies and in each case study, get at least 4-5 such phrases, then you easily collect a nice corpus of copy which reads your customer’s minds.

These are the three ways you can use your competitors to understand your customers and get great content for your copy. Do you have any more tricks? Leave them in the comments below.

The landing page for your product is the single most important page on your entire website and it is important that you communicate well on that page to connect with your customers. If you don’t speak your customer’s language, they are just going to close the tab and move on to the next page. Worse, they might have a totally different understanding of your brand or product and might never convert in the future.

Using the right language and words in the copy will make sure that you hit the right nerve when the customer reads it. It creates the kind of brand loyalty that Apple enjoys. But how would you know what your customers speak and expect? Here are 6 ideas to read your customer’s mind and write better copy.

Speak to your customers (duh!)

If you already have a few customers, talk to them. Ask them why they are using your product and how their life has become better because of you. More important, ask them how it was before your product. Ask them to explain in their own words the problems they faced and how you solved it. What problems does your product solve?

If possible ask if you can record the interview. If not, take copious notes. Make sure you note down whatever they say verbatim and not your understanding of their words. Never paraphrase.

Ask them how they searched for your product, more specifically what keywords they use in a search engine. This will help in using the right set of keywords in your landing page to improve your Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

Always ask for a testimonial. Try to get a few kinds of quotes from them. You can experiment with different quotes and see which converts better.

Don’t have Customers yet?

You don’t have customers yet? No problem. Go out and talk with your potential customers and leads. Try to listen to the choice of words they use. Sometimes, the way you as a creator/founder of the product might have a different viewpoint than the customer who is using it.

If you are building a consumer product/app, head out to a local coffee shop and interview people. Offer to buy them coffee in return for a 15-minute interview. Ask them about their current problem (related to the one your product is solving). Don’t pitch them or give them the solution yet. Remember, you are trying to understand your customer’s problems and the language they use. Don’t seed their mind with what you want to hear.

Meetups and Conferences

Another place to meet new people is to attend local meetups and conferences. Check out meetup.com to see what meetups happen in your city and attend them. Talk to the people there and talk with them. People attend meetups and conferences to network. Talk to them and ask about them and their problems. Ask how they are solving it today and how painful it is.

Facebook Groups

Check out if there is a Facebook group that has potential customers and people discussing the problems you are solving. See what topics that they are talking about and check how others respond to the posts in the comments section.

For example, let us say you are building a website to allow people to search for apartments/houses to rent. There are many groups on Facebook, split into cities which have rental information available. But one common complaint you would see is the spam on it. Anyone can post anything and there is very little moderation process. You will learn this only by reading each comment. Maybe your USP is the zero spam tolerance.

Another example: You want to start a website where people would resell movie/sporting event tickets. There are many Facebook groups which already do this and it is quite popular. But one fear users have with these groups are safety of their money. The buyer is sending money before seeing the ticket and there is no way to get back the money if the seller has cheated. Your service might talk about how you handle the money safely and securely. “You money will only be transferred after you verify your ticket is valid” is a much more powerful statement.

Reddit

There is this saying, “If it exists, there probably a subreddit for it”. Go check out Reddit if your specific niche has a subreddit. Most popular subreddits might have memes or jokes. But there are some serious subreddits, which has a pretty good discussion. If the post has the [serious] tag, especially in the AskReddit sub, the discussions are high quality.

Check for topics that are in your niche. See what people talk about and identify common patterns. Redditors are pretty polarizing and it is a good thing. You understand their problems much better.

Similarly, check other online discussion forums and groups too for such conversations.

Amazon Book Reviews

If you are selling a product/service/website which already has numerous books written about it, be prepared for a gold mine of customer’s words about the niche.

Goto Amazon and search for books about your product. Check out the reviews and start reading through each one of them. Take notes of repeating patterns and use this in your copy.

It is important to read 5-star as well as 1-star reviews. 5-Star reviews show which words made the most impact on the readers, whereas the 1-star reviews show which parts of the book are bad and you can avoid those in your product.

For example, you want to sell a baking course. Just search for all kinds of baking/cooking books and start reading the reviews. Checking this one review about a cooking book, you can see that this particular user is particular about “having very nutritious food, but at the same time do not sacrifice on flavor” and care about animals and against animal cruelty. Also, photography of the recipes is very important.

Conclusion

Using these various techniques you can easily understand what kind of words your customers use. All you have to do is just reuse the same words in your copy. It might feel like cheating, but it is just market research and explaining your product in using the words your customers understand.

By using their own words to describe the solution to their problems, they would feel like you are a mind reader and would convert more. It would also help create the most loyal fans for your product.

What other sources do you use to learn about your customer’s language?

Gone are the days when people used to pay and get software installed on each computer. SaaS has become the standard distribution method for software. Even desktop software (Photoshop, IDEs) have started the subscription route.

Let me tell you 3 stories from my own team on how we were paying for SaaS products and I started hating most of them.

Basecamp

I signed up for a project management software (Basecamp) for my team and we were using it initially for a few weeks. Basecamp is quite common among project management tools and one of the most widely used ones too.

But pretty soon, one by one, the team stopped using it and within about 4 months, no one was logging into the tool. There were still projects and open issues in the account, but there was zero activity from users.

DoneDone

Second tool we used was an issue tracker called DoneDone. I figured having an easier and simpler UI will incentivize developers to start using an issue tracker. But it also met with the same fate. After a few months, only a handful of us were using it and soon we also got demotivated since no one was tracking things as it was supposed to be. No one was using it for almost 7 months.

Slack

Like every other startup on this planet, we also use Slack for our internal real time communication. Everyone in the company has an account in slack, but not all teams use it for communicating within themselves.

There are a few teams which find Google Hangouts or Whatsapp to be better suited. Those few users eventually become inactive accounts over time, because they don’t use Slack at all. The number of active/inactive users varies by every week and Slack sends us an email of who went inactive in the past week.

Pricing of the above services

In the first two instances (Basecamp and DoneDone), we were charged for each month we had the account open. Till we cancelled the accounts, we were getting invoices and automatically charged on our credit card. We were also paying because we were too lazy to export the data out of the software.

But Slack is different. Slack implements something called the Fair Billing Policy, where you are not billed for the users who are not active. You will pay only for the users who are actively using the product. Even if someone becomes inactive, Slack gives back the prorated money as credits to apply for the next month.

This kind of pricing is interesting and I want to understand the what and why behind this.

Cost of implementing a Fair Billing Policy

For a SaaS company, especially one which doesn’t store huge amount of data, the cost of maintaining a zombie account is practically nil. Even if you are storing a few GBs of files, storage costs you a few cents every month. If you have a few paying customers, you have the money and resources to maintain the few zombie customers for free or a very low price.

Yes it does require some custom code and few if-else conditions to identify if a user/account is active or inactive. But its nothing compared to complex software you are already building. Slack’s rules are pretty simple: If a user hasn’t used Slack for 14 days, then he becomes inactive.

I am pretty sure your users table will have the last_active_on field properly filled in which will be used to calculate the active status of a user. You don’t even have to provide prorated credits like slack does. If you identify a user isn’t active for N days, then just mark him as inactive and don’t bill for him the next month.

Side Note: If you are NOT tracking whether your users are using your products and what actions they are doing when and how, then you are doing SaaS wrong. Start putting in the audit trail and other tracking logic. Using this you will be able to learn a lot more than some user research you do sitting at your desk.

Performance will be affected

I do accept that eventually the number of zombie accounts might be more than the live accounts and the performance of your database is going to be affected because of zombie accounts. For that I would suggest a two step process.

The moment you identify an account turning inactive, stop charging for them and send them emails saying that you have turned off billing for them. Many times on receiving that email, the user would restart using the product or actively go and cancel his subscription.

If the user hasn’t done both of these for a few months (I would suggest 3 months), even after you sending regular emails every month about the billing, send two emails near the end of the 3rd month. In that email give him a deadline for the reactivation of the account and send another reminder.

On the day of the deadline, take a complete export of his data and store it safely and provide an easily downloadable link in the last email to him explaining what has happened. If the user wants to resume using his account, provide an easy one-click button to restore the data from his dump file. (Don’t make him re-upload the dump)

This way you have actively communicated with the customer about the status of his data and also assured him that it is safe and can be restored in a flash. While at the same time, you have cleaned up your database from all the zombie accounts.

Why should you do this?

Now that you have seen that it is pretty easy to implement a Fair Billing Policy, you might ask why one should do this? The customer is paying every month automatically and it is easy money.

Yes, it is tempting to keep getting the steady income every month. But as a service provider to your customer, you have the Moral Obligation to protect the customer even against his own stupidity or ignorance.

Because Slack has a Fair Billing Policy, I am more than happy to use it rather than it’s competitors, even though it costs 2x. This becomes your competitive advantage. By documenting your fair billing policy as a feature in your product, your customers would trust you more than others and will register with you rather than your competitors.

Conclusion

If you are building a SaaS product, make sure to include a Fair Billing Policy in your list of features. It will be an extra couple of months to build and implement it right, but it would be worth the efforts you put in. And you would also gain the goodwill of your customers.

Many companies today uses Google Suite for their Email and everyone has gotten used to the Gmail interface. One advantage of Gmail is, safe and easy programmatic access to the emails via IMAP.

The problem I am trying to solve here is you might not know when a person would respond back when you send an email. You will compose an email, hit send and wait forever. I know that Emails are Asynchronous, but it would be a nice to have an idea of when one can expect a reply.

I get ideas and topics to write in my blog during unusual time and places and I wanted to have an easy way to track them. Also I wanted to maintain an editorial calendar which can help track my progress with my November month Challenge of writing one blog post everyday.

I just have two requirements:

Ability to note down blog topics with the least possible efforts and sync it with my wordpress blog.

Plan and display the posts in a nice editorial calendar.

Past couple of weeks, I have been playing around with Zapier and one feature that I love is building custom zaps if there aren’t existing zaps which solve your problem. The first custom zap that I created was to sync blog topics from Airtable to WordPress.

Airtable -> WordPress

Airtable is basically a “spreadsheet without the confusing formulae and math functions”. You can easily create a lightweight spreadsheet/database which can be accessed programmatically. I created an “Editorial Calendar” base and a table for my blog.

In it, I had 5 columns: Title, Date Scheduled, Status, Category, Comments. And I keep creating new rows for each idea that I get.

The nice thing about Airtable is you can change how you view the spreadsheet. You can display it as a Calendar view based on the Date Scheduled field or as a Kanban view based on the status field.

For the Editorial Calendar I chose the Calendar view. Now I can drag and drop entries on the calendar and the date field will be automatically updated in.

After connecting both Airtable and WordPress, I created a zap. When a new record is created (trigger) in this particular table, it will create a new post in WordPress (action) and save it as draft. Now when I get an idea about a new blog topic, I just have to create an entry in the table.

I get the added advantage of displaying the list of posts as a calendar and as a Kanban board. The only disadvantage is you have to manually delete the posts after you have published it and all the history about the idea is now lost.

Trello -> WordPress

Another option I setup recently is to track the ideas in a Trello board and use a custom zap to save the draft when I create a new card. The steps are almost similar, except that you use Trello instead of Airtable to track ideas. And as I keep publishing new posts, I can move the cards to the right list. And after a few days I can archive the cards, maintaining the history about the idea.

For the calendar view, there is nice free WordPress plugin called Editorial Calendar which displays all the posts you have scheduled in a calendar. You can drag and reschedule posts too. And I can create an idea card template containing checklist of items to track before publishing the post and reuse that for all new ideas.

Sample of a Template card

I am trying out both Trello and Airtable to track my editorial calendar. Any kind of productivity tool needs experimentation and I am going to track how I use both to see if any one process fits my mental model.

I have been using Pinboard for nearly an year and it has been a great replacement for Delicious, except for one minor gripe: It doesn’t have a good app for iPhone. I read lot of articles on my phone and want an easy way to save them as unread bookmarks in Pinboard.

The official way of sending an email to a secret email address sucks. I have to remember how to structure the email and it is an unwanted cognitive load. And composing and email and sending it requires more steps than clicking a button if there was an app.

After searching for many months I found one solution that seems to work. I frequently use Pocket to save articles that I want to read later (yes I know Pinboard also has read later feature). Since I already have Pocket installed on my mobile, I decided to create a trigger whenever I save articles to Pocket using Zapier.

If you didn’t know, Zapier is a like IFTTT(If this, then that), but on steroids. There are so many services and integrations that you can enable using Zapier. The best part is, even if you don’t have a particular recipe (or zap as they call it), as long as Zapier supports a website or service, you can plug and play it with any other service.

Anyway, I searched for a Pocket -> Pinboard zap and found someone had already created the recipe. I just had to authenticate my account for both the services and enable the zap.

Now whenever I want to save an article to Pinboard from my phone, I just save it to pocket (and also add tags) and it magically just appears on my Pinboard. If someone builds/has a nice app for Pinboard which doesn’t suck, let me know. Till then, this solution will suffice.